Keywords

1 Introduction

In recent decades, the Chinese economy has advanced to become second behind the US. China has become a producer for many domestically targeted computer-based products/services and a producer for global markets, with the ability (via Internet access) to offer direct selling and shipping. China has become, also, a target for companies worldwide offering products/services. All of these products/services possess user experiences (UXs), that is, user interfaces, user touch points, etc. There is now a challenge to create successful UXs, that is usable, useful, and appealing UXs that work with all major stakeholders: the user community, engineering, marketing, business management, government, investors, and journalists. Exploring UX issues could cover country/culture criteria, design philosophy, methods, evaluation criteria for all stakeholders, and relations among stakeholders such as collaboration among engineering, design, marketing, and business. Specific issues could include these:

  • How can Chinese software/hardware developers create a successful user-experience for domestic and foreign products and services?

  • How can foreign software/hardware developers create a successful user-experience for Chinese products and services?

  • Is there a significant difference in the Chinese UX, as opposed to the Western UX?

  • What is the nature of the Chinese UX?

  • Are there any significant design patterns in the Chinese UX?

  • How might one design more effectively and efficiently for the Chinese UX?

  • Where might one look for examples of Chinese UX design?

  • What information resources exist to help designers of the Chinese UX?

In this paper we explore only a few of these questions about user-experience and user-interface design. We have based our hypothesis of an emerging Chinese UX on examination of previous qualitative and quantitative research. We hope to raise usable, useful, and appealing issues to consider further.

2 User-Interface, User-Experience, and User-Centered Design

Marcus [24], Brejcha [3], among others, have identified the key components of all human-computer-, or user-interfaces:

  • Metaphors: Fundamental concepts communicated through visible, verbal, sonic, tactile, and other “languages”

  • Mental models: Organization (structure) of data, functions, people, activities

  • Navigation: Movement through the mental models

  • Interaction: Input/output techniques and overall behavior of systems

  • Appearance: Perceptual characteristics (visual, verbal, sonic, tactile, etc.)

In addition, information visualization (tables, forms, charts, maps, and diagrams) is a specific composite of these components, enabling users to access operating systems, applications, functions, and data of computer-based products and services.

User-centered design (UCD), as discussed in many books and publications (e.g., by Marcus [24] and Hartson and Pyla [9]) links the process of developing software, hardware, the user-interface (UI), and the total user-experience (UX) to the people who will use a product/service. The Chinese UX will inevitably result from a Chinese UCD process. The user experience can be defined as the “totality of the […] effects felt by a user as a result of interaction with, and the usage context of, a system, device, or product, including the influence of usability, usefulness, and emotional impact during interaction, and savoring the memory after interaction” [9]. That definition means the UX goes well beyond usability issues, involving, also, social and cultural interaction, value-sensitive design, emotional impact, fun, and aesthetics. The UCD process focuses on users throughout all these development tasks, which sometimes occur iteratively: plan, research, analyze, design, evaluate, implement, document, train, and maintain.

In addition, Marcus [24], de Souza [5], and Brejcha [3], among others, have identified the use of semiotics to analyze UX design, and Marcus [17, 18], Sun [29], Brejcha [3], Kyriakoullis and Panayiotis [13], among others, have identified the relationship of culture to UX design.

We do not elaborate on these concepts and terms, because they are familiar to most readers, are widely understood, and are explained in numerous resources. They must all be reconsidered in the light of Chinese UX and Chinese UCD. We consider a few.

3 Cross-Cultural UX Design

Theorists of culture, anthropologists, ethnographers, and professionals in the UX field have devised descriptions of culture, proposed models of culture, and explored similarities and differences of patterns of feelings, opinions, actions, signs, rituals, and values, as Hofstede and Hofstede [10] and Schwartz [27], among others, have described them. Marcus and Baumgartner [20] studied approximately 39 dimensions of culture from about nine different culture models that were vetted by about 60 professionals, researchers, and academics to arrive at a “Top Five” set of culture dimensions: context (high or low), technology (status of development and attitudes), uncertainty avoidance (high or low), time perception (long- vs. short-term, but also focusing on future, present, or past), and authority conception (high or low). Still others have explored ethnographic approaches not based on culture models.

Researchers noticed differences between Chinese and Western (that is, European and North-American) users: Hofstede and Hofstede [Hofstede, 2005] needed to add a fifth dimension (long-term vs. short-term time orientation) to a model stemming from studies in 1978–1983 to account for a pattern of differences that seemed to occur with China-influenced (namely Confucian-influenced) Asian countries vs. Western countries. Marcus [17] described and visualized differences of user-interface designs for North-American, European, and, by implied, but unstated extension, Chinese users. Honold [11] had investigated differences between the way German and Chinese users acquire information about using mobile phones, using a mixture of Hofstede and other models, and found strong correlations between theoretical implications derived from the models and results of testing. Choong and Salvendy [4] noted differences between US and Chinese computer science students in their mental models of the rooms of a house at home and what kinds of objects might be found in those rooms; when they gave the others’ mental model to participants, they had more difficulty thinking with the mental model and made more errors. Marcus and Baumgartner [21] studied Websites (business-to-business and business-to-consumer) and analyzed differences in corporate Website standards for different countries (cultures) using Hofstede’s dimensions as a guide; they found that there seemed to be distinctive differences in the use of imagery, thinking about size of text vs. importance of the content, and other differences based on the general expectations of cultural differences. Lee [16] considered the characteristics of a “virtual Confucian” media choices in a virtual Confucian workplace.

Dong [6] discovered patterns of differences among Taiwanese, Korean, and US viewers of Websites, using eye-tracking equipment; the US viewers tended to scan the Website screen in a figure S or 5 shape, then relatively quickly dive into the layers of information below, while the Asian viewers tended to circle the Website page, viewing individual items more thoroughly before descending into the information architecture. Frandsen-Thorlacius et al. [7] studied Danish vs. Chinese users to determine if the very concept of usability differed between the two cultures. It did. Chinese users considered that the concept of “usability” more strongly possessed the attributes of “fun” and “aesthetically pleasing” built into the concept than was the case for Danish users. Based, in part, on studies of Japanese and US participants staring at fish tanks and describing what they saw (Japanese viewers tended to describe relationships, US viewers tended to describe objects), Nisbett [26] postulated that there were major cognitive differences between the East and the West; people in these two geographic regions think differently, with Easterners seeming to possess, among other differences, a greater ability to consider logical opposites simultaneously without conflict. In summary, Nisbett seemed to be saying, “Cartesian logic is fine, and may be what Europeans and North Americans prefer, but it is not the only way to think.” These comments are presciently described in McNeil and Freiberger’s book [25] about the achievements of Prof. Lofti Zadeh, who invented fuzzy set theory in the US, which was ignored by US mathematicians and computer technology professionals, but flourished in Japan and later Asia. According to [25], in 1993, there were about 10,000 experts of fuzzy logic in China but only a few hundred in the US. The authors go out of their way to call attention to cultural differences and differences in thinking methods.

In the 21st century, especially in the last five or ten years, with the rise of China, the increased exchange of products and services, articles and books about cross-cultural UX design have emerged. Many of these in the last five years are documented in an extensive bibliography compiled by Kyriakoullis and Zaphiris [14].

3.1 Hints of an Emerging Chinese UX

These publications over the past decades lead us to conclude there may be emerging a fundamentally Chinese UX more suitable to Chinese users than the paradigms imposed on China by Western computer technology during the past half-century. Several key moments in the authors’ own experiences point to emerging patterns:

In 2002, Marcus saw an exhibit of the Wukong project shown at the New Paradigms in Using Computers conference, IBM Santa Theresa Laboratory, San Jose, California, USA. The Sony-Ericsson development team, together with outside consultants, which included a Chinese-American anthropologist fluent in Mandarin, designed a personal digital assistant for Chinese users that incorporated aspects of “guanxi” (关系, life-long Chinese relationship-building). Tests of the initial prototype in China showed it received superior reviews on all aspects of its design in comparison to similar offerings from US, Europe, Japan, and other sources [23].

In the early 2000s, Marcus reviewed for a journal an article from Chinese sources that proposed new metaphors for Chinese software applications based on concepts derived from Chinese gardens, concepts which seemed “strange” and “foreign” Marcus surmised this may be similar to the reaction Chinese viewers originally had when first encountering Western computer technology.

In November 2012, in Shanghai, a corporate Chinese executive speaking with Marcus conjectured that there might be a truly Chinese fundamental user experience, which, if implemented, might make it difficult or even impossible for Western users to access and operate applications and operating systems of Chinese computer technology.

At that same time in 2012, Marcus met Dr. Jui Shang-Ling, then Managing Director, SAP Labs China, Shanghai, who had authored two books [12, 13] proposing that the future of China technologically and economically lay in the prospect that China would not just manufacture (build and distribute) Chinese products and services, but would also design them.

Baradit observed over a five-year period working in China (2009–2014) the significant density and complexity of Chinese news sites and consumer portals, in which hundreds of items (images, links, buttons, text) are distributed in viewable panes, often requiring scrolling for access. In addition, the input of characters using Pinyan techniques require intermediate options-constructs before users can proceed further to make database selections of likely characters in a string sequence. This technique seems clearly to affect functionality of search/filters and navigation and likely has development and design implications, which should be researched further.

Marcus observed a poster from Zhu, from China, [31] at the Interaction Design and Human Factors Conference 2014 (http://idhf.xrenlab.com) in Kochi, Japan, 25–26 November 2014, proposing a new metaphor for information-visualization of body-sensor data that would be more effective, engaging, and increase multi-sensory perception, based on viewing a fish in a pond, a seemingly very Chinese, or at least Asian, concept.

In the closing keynote lecture of the User Friendly 2014 (sponsored by the User Experience Professionals Association of China), Wuxi, China, on 16 November 2014, Prof Lou Yongxi, Dean of the College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, gave a forceful address oriented to Chinese user-experience designers. He urged the audience to recognize the unique circumstances of Chinese history, culture, and people, and to put that realization into action, by not just theorizing, but designing and building entirely new, inherently Chinese solutions to the great challenges that China now faces [15].

3.2 The Emerging Chinese UX: Characteristics and Examples

Based on readings such as those cited above and [16–18, 26, and 27], Marcus’ experience being in China on about 12 occasions since 1975, and Baradit’s recent experience working in China for approximately five years, the authors speculate that the emerging Chinese UX will differ strongly in key characteristics. Note that further research may illuminate new or different characteristics per storytelling patterns, government, and identity factors.

Metaphors: As noted above, new metaphors may emerge that are fundamentally Chinese and well-established in Chinese history and culture. To the Chinese, they may seem easy to understand and use, re-assuring, and “natural”. Chinese viewers would immediately and effortlessly understand patterns of information and knowledge, kinds of storytelling, and allusions or references. To Westerners, these same metaphors may seem foreign, even “alien”, unknown, unfamiliar, dysfunctional, and perhaps even threatening. Examples might include complex displays of gardens and fish ponds as stand-ins for display of large, complex systems. An example might be the status of 500 entities viewed at once, each with 7 ± 2 key characteristics, each of which might be in one, or more, or 7 ± 2 key states. The challenge would be especially great if one had to make key strategic or tactical decisions within a short time, say 30 s. Note, for example, that TenCent’s new WeBank (www.webank.com) mobile banking application (with no brick-and-mortar buildings) uses simple, quick, appealing visual storytelling to explain the objects and objectives of its system, and does so with cute icons and animations. Many Chinese mobile apps use the concept of “discovery” to find new, unexpected functionality within applications.

Mental Models: Mental models may emerge that are fundamental to Chinese history and culture. and may seem for Chinese users to be easy to understand and use, re-assuring, and familiar, but may seem foreign, even alien, unknown, unfamiliar, and dysfunctional to Westerners. Recall that Choong and Salvendy cited above showed users could operate more effectively and efficiently when working with familiar mental models. This observed pattern of “everything-in-one” may result from top-down or bottom-up yet-to-be-fully-analyzed social and economic forces. Grover [8] summarizes recent Chinese mobile applications and notes they are individually accumulating more features, some of them seemingly unrelated but appealing, while US mobile applications increasingly are more narrow focused, minimalist, and task-driven. A few other Chinese examples are the following:

Mobile WeChat offers abundant functionality similar to WhatsApp. Besides messaging, WeChat offers video calls, a news feed, a wallet with a payments service, a Favorites feature functioning something like Evernote, a game center (with a built-in game), a location-based people finder, a “Shazam-like” song-matching service, and a mail client. Its official accounts platform provides a layer to allow hardware devices to use the app to communicate with services, instead of requiring custom apps. Baidu Maps has weather, an optional “Find My Friends” feature, travel guides, a full “wallet” mode for purchasing things. Tencent Maps lets users send audio postcards. Both of them, and WeChat, have QR code readers and Groupon-style local offers. Weibo, once a Twitter analog, does much more. Its “Post” button allows one to post up to 10 distinct types of content, from blog entry to restaurant review. Weibo, also, has acquired a wallet feature.

Navigation: Navigation schema, as noted above, may emerge that are fundamental to Chinese history and may seem foreign, even alien, unknown, unfamiliar, and dysfunctional to Westerners, but for Chinese users are easy to understand and use, re-assuring, and familiar. The ability and/or preference for large displays of information that encourage a “tour of the surface,” so evident in traditional Chinese painting, calligraphy, and typography, may suggest such a distinction that is supported in Dong’s eye-tracking experiments cited above.

Interaction: New interaction paradigms may emerge that are fundamental to Chinese history and culture. These preferences may seem foreign, even alien, unknown, unfamiliar, and dysfunctional to Westerners, but they would be easy to understand and use, re-assuring, and familiar, enabling Chinese users to work with character displays, visual attributes, sound, and other input/output techniques more effectively. In a recent summary of Chinese mobile applications by Grover [8], he comments that voice messaging in chat applications such as WeChat is popular because it removes the challenge of typing, can be used by older users without much computer proficiency, and may assist large numbers of people with limited literacy.

Appearance: New visual appearance characteristics may appear that are fundamental to Chinese history and culture. Think of the traditional decorations of architecture, vases, paintings, and calligraphy, that are quite different from either baroque/rococo European painting or the minimalist traditions of the Bauhaus and Swiss-German Typography of the 20th century. In addition, the frequency of cute mascots, icons, animations, and storytelling seem to indicate a unique Asian, and specifically Chinese approach (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Example of Chinese cuteness found throughout cities, publications, websites, and applications.

Full size image

There are a few additional key differentiators to consider:

Space: In his closing keynote lecture of the User Friendly 2014 conference in Wuxi, China, Prof Lou Yongxi, cited above, spoke of the great spaces of China as a key context and challenge. The scale of some public visual displays seems at times quite extraordinary. China as a land mass is only 90,000 square miles smaller (about the size of the US state of Michigan), and cultural history has shown the influence of the “wide open spaces” in the US on its technology, society, and culture. It seems likely that Chinese UX solutions may emerge that focus on large displays, public displays, or the traversal of large virtual spaces as giant two-dimensional experiences before “descending” into layers below, that is, flatter hierarchies. This approach was actually tried in the 1960s in the US when the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, under the leadership of Nicholas Negroponte, with Richard Bolt, designed and implemented its Spatial Database Management System [Brant, 1988; Herot, 1980]. The approach featured a large virtual space that one could review on a wall-sized display viewed from the comfort of an “executive” reclining chair. However, this approach never caught on like the Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft versions of graphical user interfaces. The difference in the Chinese approach to depicting large, dense visual spaces of text, imagery, and controls is already evident in Web shopping sites associated with Singles Day, 1 November 2014, the largest single transaction day in world history (US$8.18b, RMB50b). Figure 2 shows a typical screen.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Typical singles day shopping screen showing dense contents.

Full size image

Time: Chinese society has been at work continuously for 4000 years. Few countries/cultures can claim that heritage and be in a position today to dominate world markets, technology, society, politics, and culture. This perspective gives China a unique “view” of the word and its time scale. This may evidence or present itself in time scales of information displays, the time that it takes for information to travel throughout its society, etc. In addition, due to specific governmental and social contexts, in China some activities may go more slowly in order to be considered “valid” or “official.” Quicker is not always better. As the Wukong project pointed out [23], US business relations focus on doing business quickly and maybe becoming friends later, while the Chinese approach emphasizes taking one’s time to become friends and then maybe doing business.

Scale: On the occasion of visiting the central China city of Xian for the first time, Marcus asked a tour guide how many people lived in Xian. The guide replied, “Oh, it is a small city, about 7 million people.” This difference of “small cities” in the US vs. China seems significant. With more than four times the population of the US, solutions to large scale seem imperative. This may lead to unique solutions for how to handle large amounts of participants and money in Internet purchase/pay systems, how to deal with social media networks significantly larger than any existing today (with all the differences of privacy, personality, and context). One other observation is that one million hits in the US on a Website or social platform means something is very popular, but in China, with many more people, the scale of popularity is several times larger. It also seems possible that only a few major socially approved and governmentally approved applications may provide all major functionality in China. In China, it seems, one is part of the team, or one is significantly an outsider.

3.3 Cautions and Future Challenges

In all of this speculation, one must keep in mind that China itself is a vast, complex amalgam of peoples, ethnic groups, different spoken languages, and writing systems. There are officially 56 ethnic groups; the Han people dominate with about 94 % of the population. There are states of China like those in which the Uighurs who use a different writing system and language, have a different (Moslem) religion and culture, and who do not consider themselves “Chinese.” In the northeast of China, there is a large semi-autonomous areas in which people speak a form of Korean similar to North Korean. Future research may involve asking people whether they consider themselves Chinese, and whether they consider themselves Han. There is a need to clarify what is the “China” in the concept of “Chinese UX.” Perhaps there are several major “dialects” of the Chinese UX. It seems likely that the article by Marcus [22] about proof of return-on-investment for user-interface design in about cost-justifying usability studies may need to be reconceived and re-developed for the Chinese context.

Although we can only speculate at this point, the authors believe the characteristics described here can provide guidance and stimulation to others who may be able to research topics more thoroughly and design specific solutions that demonstrate the impact of China on UX design.